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Portal Home is displaying funny characters in Firefox

Ingrid_GlatzIngrid_Glatz Customer Adept IT Monkey ✭✭

Hi folks,

a colleague of mine has told me that when using Firefox Community Edition ESR 60.1.0.0 English, clicking the Alternate Home URL, the portal displays funny characters and some strange formation (see attached image). From "Need help finding.." down to the bottom, everything's displayed fine. This area of the characters usually is an empty space. All other tabs like work items, requests, search and others work and display as expected. IE 11 is doing fine also.

Me and another colleague do not have the issue either, but we're using the German version of Firefox. Obviously, this issue occurred after the last Windows security patching for February last week. OS is Windows 10. Does anybody have the same issue and knows how to fix it? Always using IE is not the solution for my colleague.

Thanks

Ingrid

Answers

  • Tony_CollettTony_Collett Cireson Support Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    The Cireson Portal is not supported in Firefox any versions. We currently support Internet Explorer, Edge and Google Chrome. 

    If this occured after patching, then is it possible to revert the patching process?

    Are there any weird characters being used in the Service Offering which may cause this to happen?
  • Ingrid_GlatzIngrid_Glatz Customer Adept IT Monkey ✭✭

    It's not a Service Offering, but clicking the Alternate Home tab that is displaying these funny characters.

    Because we offer Service Offerings in French and German also, there might be some "weird" characters because of the languages. Characters that are not known in English. But this has never caused any issues.

    Reverting Windows security patching is definitely not possible. Because it's a single machine, I won't go into more detailed analysis. I was just wondering whether anybody else has ever seen this.

    Thanks.

  • Tom_HendricksTom_Hendricks Customer Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    We have non-English characters in many places, but not necessarily at the top of the Service Catalog.  I do not see any strange ANSI characters in v9 when viewing from Firefox, but I'll keep my eyes open as we continue to expand it.  We do use non-language ANSI characters on some of our forms, and those are rendering just fine in Firefox (also v9).
    The Cireson Portal is not supported in Firefox any versions. We currently support Internet Explorer, Edge and Google Chrome. 
    I have to preface this by saying that I think I fully understand why IE is supported, but I am going to say this anyway: Is supporting IE instead of Firefox really the best use of dev/testing resources, in light of Microsoft publicly declaring that IE isn't even a browser anymore (but a "compatibility layer")?

    One could argue that at least Chrome is supported and that is probably good enough, but to give one example, your product really looks best in FF due to the way it renders text and vectors so clearly.  For many this is arbitrary, but for those with impaired vision, it makes a tangible difference.  I also find that writing code that works in Chrome and FF, despite their differences with some JS, is simpler than having it work in both Chrome and IE.

    My question is rhetorical and no answer is necessary (feel free, though!) but I thought it was important to put this out there for consideration.  :)
  • Tony_CollettTony_Collett Cireson Support Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2019
    I have to preface this by saying that I think I fully understand why IE is supported, but I am going to say this anyway: Is supporting IE instead of Firefox really the best use of dev/testing resources, in light of Microsoft publicly declaring that IE isn't even a browser anymore (but a "compatibility layer")?

    We made the decision about a year ago to stop supporting Firefox as it has quite a low market share compared to Chrome. See here: http://gs.statcounter.com/

    We still support IE and Edge because for many businesses, that is the default browser and no other browsers are allowed from a security PoV. IE won't show as much on Statcounter as trackers are generally the first and easiest to block. 

    I believe market share for Firefox was hovering around 3% when we stopped support, but it's now at 5%. We will probably review this again when Firefox does increase in usage, but at this stage Firefox will remain unsupported (although you can still use Firefox, if you have any issues, our first question might be 'are you using Firefox? Switch to Chrome and see if the problem goes away)

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